Interview:Elan and Others Today in Second Life (4:00pm)
From BoingBoing:
Future Salon: alternate reality games
“Tomorrow’s Future Salon in Second Life is, appropriately, on the topic of alternate reality games and pervasive gaming. Participants include 42 Entertainment‘s Elan Lee (BB pal Jane McGonigal‘s collaborator on projects like ilovebees), Tony “Clickable Culture” Walsh, and Adrian and/or Dan Hon of Mind Candy , creators of Perplex City. The in-game salon takes place tomorrow, Monday 11/27, at 4pm PST. Link “
Here’s a direct link to the announcement, which includes links to be able to listen in live if you’re not a SecondLife member.
This whole ARG in virtual space thing is getting bandied about a lot lately, which is strange, to me. While it’s a nifty idea, someone’s definitely missing the point that what makes ARGs unique is the fact that they reach out and touch the REAL WORLD. Unless I’m missing something, what’s being talked about is no different than a typical adventure game, albeit with a new interface.
I’m an Alternate Reality Game experience designer/consultant, and founding partner of No Mimes Media... | 
links, leading to links, leading to TOO MUCH TO READ… but let me ask you this: You played, Uru, and accessed the shared world of Uru Live years ago. Wasn’t that world real to you? You were not role-playing, but were there as yourself, as an explorer in this Cavern they found in the American Southwest. It was as real-world as you wanted to believe it. (OK, if you drove out to the desert, you probably wouldn’t find Zandi’s trailer.) People had direct contact with DRC members in the Cavern, and exchanged emails with those “characters” too. Events played out in real time, and “players” became part of the story. Doesn’t that make it an ARG?
(p.s. your comment form’s textboxes for ‘Name’ and ‘Mail’ are using yellow-on-white input text — very hard to see what i’m typing)
(double-posting because I can’t edit a comment)
Here’s some more about the interactive story element in Uru Live:
http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=287208#287208
And here is a post on an Uru forum about whether they should play it “in cavern” or “out of cavern” — sure sounds like a meta post talking about role-playing versus being “in the moment” with an ARG.
http://www.drcsite.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=25193#25193
Some good quotes include: “A deeply immersive adventure game in realtime.” and “Simply respond to your environment as if D’ni were real and you will benefit greatly. You don’t have to make anything up.”
I know for you the deal-breaker is whether or not the DRC will show up in the real world. How about a regularly updated website? Remember “The Echo”, that newsletter which reported on daily events? I suppose none of that will be real enough for you until they have a traveling exhibit of firemarbles and other artifacts. It just goes back to the continuum of gaming/fiction/interaction and cross-media/platform/persistence.
First, I can see black on white when I type, so weird. :/
Anyway, I’m thinking this whole thing with ARG-like games happening in virtual spaces is solidifying something in my mind, as it relates to ARGs.
To me, there are basically three main components to that which we call ARGs (not meaning to open THIS can of worms again :P): Story, Archaeology and Touching the Real World. These three things have consistently been present in every true ARG I’ve seen, and really, the earmark, the thing that’s made ARGs unique has been this touch. Putting a little bit of magic in peoples’ lives, albeit small, in the form of calling a real phone number or a character calling you, finding a CD at a deaddrop, getting out in the sunlight and looking for payphones, finding a hat in a parking lot. An ARG invades reality. If a game doesn’t do that, if the reality of the game space is a virtual one, than I humbly submit that it’s not really an ARG, it should be called something else.
Don’t get me wrong, I really really loved Uru (and some of my coworkers worked on that game) and, while it was definitely unique in creating a gamespace that was simultaneously shared by multiple players, it was still basically an Adventure Game. As would be what they’re talking about by putting on an “ARG” inside SecondLife. Unique and cool, definitely. ARG, no.
See, if you walk down a *real* city street and you find an *actual* magical glowing fruit and pick it up and it hums and you eat it and you see visions of an URL, that’s pretty magic and cool. But if you’re on the computer flying around with green hair, watching your friends create blue donuts that fall on you from the sky and you find this same fruit, click it and a web browser opens to a URL…..magic? Not so much. :)
That’s the difference.
Agreed — I don’t understand the attraction of an “ARG” that takes place entirely within a virtual world. But then again, I hate RPGs and things like WoW bore me, so maybe I’m missing something.
That said, I can envision scenarios in which it might be cool to use a virtual world within an ARG, rather than the other way around.
To go off on a brief tangent: throughout world mythologies you see stories of people journeying into other worlds, where everything might be illusion and the rules are similar but not quite the same as those of the real world. They’re obviously alluring — beautiful people, beautiful settings, (generally illusory) wealth beyond imagining — but they’re also potentially dangerous: people may starve to death eating food that’s only a mirage, dance themselves to death because they never feel tired, or spend far more time there than they had intended because they’re caught up in it.
Sound familiar?
With the urban legends of people being found dead in their apartments from playing too much Everquest or whatever, stories like the X-Files or the Matrix involving digital worlds over which humans have lost control and which have therefore become dangerous to enter, and so on, it really seems to me that in an age when we no longer believe in journeys to the underworld or through doors under the hill, digital worlds are our modern-day equivalent.
Returning to ARGs, I’m not sure the technology is quite there yet, but the fact that PMs could potentially control user experiences within a digital world beyond what the user would expect seems to have some potential to me. People think they know what to expect from a trip into Second Life. Which seems to me to make it an interesting venue to make something completely UNEXPECTED happen to them, having sent them there under rules they think they understand (go talk to this character who thinks it’s too dangerous to meet with you in person; someone’s left you a clue in SL — figure out where and go get it; etc.).
Like the protagonist of the fairy story who goes through the door under the hill, finds himself at a beautiful formal dinner, and suddenly everything vanishes and he’s face to face with someone he never expected to meet.
Virtual spaces *are* becoming part of real life, just like websites and cell phones and fax machines and videoconferencing.
In my mind what ARGs do in order to “put a little bit of magic” into people’s lives is to use familiar everyday situations and objects and technologies — like, oh, say, payphones or poker sites ;-) — in unfamiliar ways.
The difference between a payphone and a virtual world is that we EXPECT magic from virtual worlds. Magic there has, in a sense, become mundane.
So as virtual spaces become more familiar, I think the question becomes how do you use them in a way that will make them unfamiliar — and therefore magical — to participants.
Not that I have any good ideas on how, exactly, to do that. :-/